I’ll try to keep this post short. Because that’s what I’ve been appreciating lately: few words. At almost 11 months old now, our Little Bean is right on the cusp of being able to say…something. And what I’m finding is that I’m savoring every moment of this Beautiful Wordless period.
Because she can communicate just fine. She points at anything and everything these days, to see what I’ll say she’s seeing, or to indicate that she “wants that,” or is going to go crawl after something. She grunts and grimaces very clearly when she is “all done” with what she’s eating, and she can (and sometimes does) also sign “all done.” As for the other end of the digestive cycle (forgive me, child), it’s very, very clear from her red grunting face when she’s pooping. When I put music on or pull out the vacuum, she claps her hands with excitement and gladness. She waves hello and goodbye when people come and go. And this week, when she’s ready to sleep, she just crawls right into her co-sleeper and lays her head down.
I’m also appreciating the beautiful wordlessness because it’s so unique. Every other relationship and interaction in my life involves words. Establishing a new working relationship, sorting out a misunderstanding, keeping up with e-mail, or even just reviewing a complex day takes so many words, so many sentences, so much effort. There is something truly sublime about how a baby at a certain age and developmental stage can do all those things, pretty much—connect with people, transition from one event to the next, express frustration or love, unwind from a day—all without words.
For several years before I got pregnant, I was not particularly enthused about babies. I used to shrug about them, really, thinking to myself specifically about all that crying about who-knows-what. The lack of words, which I associated with an inability to communicate, actually kind of concerned and worried me. What would I ever do with a crying baby? Well. I’ve had plenty of opportunity now to learn, to try things, and to sometimes just be present with her crying self. We’ve endured together. I’ve learned that usually the crying is about one of a handful of things, or she just needs to “get her cry out,” as we say around here. Which, honestly, don’t we all sometimes? But as mature adults it can take us hours of talking things through to accomplish the same result.
There is so much we all already communicate without words; I know this, but I like to remind myself of it. Just the hint of a smile or a glance away from the person in front of us can convey so much—I know, I read all about it once. For now, I love to watch our Little Bean playing, reaching for things, moving around our apartment, figuring out how to get from one place to another, discovering the world, all without words, touching everything, looking at me to see if I’ll shake my head no and say that blur of phrase I know she recognizes: “noooo, not-in-your-mouth,” before she moves on to the next thing and the next and the next. Discovering. Beautiful wordlessness.
Being with her on thunderstorming afternoons like the one we had today reminds me to appreciate every person in my life with whom I’ve shared wordless time. A hike along a long trail with 20 feet of sweet silence between us, a bowl of ice cream with only the sound of our clinking spoons after a long day, sitting on the front porch listening to birdsong, pulling weeds and picking sugar snap peas in the garden at twilight—whenever or wherever it’s been, thank you for that sweet silent time. I’m going to be looking to create more of that this summer.
May you also have some beautifully wordless time in your days.
All religions, all this singing, one song. Rumi
1.
A poet I met once,
Leslie Scalapino, said
“stay in continual
conceptual rebellion.”
She thought we must
“re-form” our minds,
“make it new, every day,”
as Pound put it, or fall
for the snake oil routines
of all the drummers and
askers around us.
“No” to con-vention,
she thought, checking
out of the general meeting
where the selling
is done is “yes” to life.
2.
Seeing things as they are,
Nagarjuna said, is the way
to wisdom. Finding first causes,
hooks on which to hang a hat,
is a fool’s game and leads
to distinctions–this is
not that. And on and on.
Until there’s only suffering.
We like listening
to the snake oil salesmen
throwing out distinctions
and offering attachments.
It’s entertaining.
It’s death.
3.
When an old man was asked
what held the earth up, he
said, “It sits on a turtle.”
And under the turtle?
“Another turtle.” And
under that one? “It’s turtles
all the way down,” the man
laughed. And it is. Turtles.
It’s turtles all the way down;
turtles all the way up;
turtles in every direction,
and turtles because there
is no direction. It’s turtles,
and we, too, are turtles.
Or one turtle.
Or snake oil.
Or light.
Today the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and declared that the proponents of California’s Prop 8 had no standing to argue against Judge Walker’s ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional. What these rulings mean in the real world seems pretty straightforward. Same-sex couples can finally resume getting married in California. Same-sex couples who are legally married in states that allow their unions will be entitled to the full federal benefits of marriage. For me, as someone who was married in California during the brief period when it was legal before Prop 8, it means that I won’t have to keep filing my state taxes as a married person and my federal taxes as someone who is single. It means that if I die before my wife that she will be entitled to my Social Security benefits, and that our house will belong to her. The benefits are significant, and tangible.
But the non-tangible benefits mean so much more. The Supreme Court’s rulings mean that we are, like the Velveteen Rabbit, finally Real. At long last the law of the land recognizes what we’ve known all along: that two people who fall in love and commit to one another for life, who have a child and a house and dogs and cats together, who argue and make up and talk about their day and eat dinner and check homework and sleep in the same bed are married. Just plain married. Not domestic-partnershipped or gay-married, but married. Real. Entitled to refer to one another as “my wife,” and have people understand what that means.
I know that a judicial ruling won’t change the hearts of all the people who feel that our relationship is counter to God’s will, or simply icky. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. But everyone is not entitled to have their opinion enshrined as law, and the law has finally stood up and said that equal rights are equal rights, and that your personal theology and comfort levels don’t get to trump that fact. If your church doesn’t want to perform weddings for two men or two women, fine. My church is happy to. Was happy to 15 years ago when Kelsey and I stood up in front of our family and friends, our church community, and declared our life-long commitment and enduring love, and is happy to now. Only now, in some select states of the union, the minister can sign the wedding license knowing that it is Real, not a second-class document that somehow disappears if you cross the state line.
That matters. It matters that so many of my friends, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, religious and unchurched, have been hoping and praying for this day. It matters that in the course of my lifetime we have gone from the Stonewall riots to the highest court in the land declaring that “no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”
I would like to wrap this joyful moment in a bow and declare, with Theodore Parker and Dr. King, that the “moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But I know it’s not that simple. I know that yesterday the same Supreme Court which today ruled to protect my personhood and dignity ruled against key portions of the Voting Rights Act. I know that the arc of the moral universe is less of an arc than a squiggle, bending this way and that, and only because people take the trouble to bend it. I know that the status of my marriage is a small thing compared to families torn apart by immigration laws, or the bizarre declaration of Citizens United that corporations are people and money is speech. I also know that my 18 years with the love of my life are a gift and a blessing regardless of what the courts have to say. But still, in spite of it all, there is the fact that we have arrived at this moment, somewhat the worse for wear, and with much of our fur worn off, to hear People Who Matter declare that we are, in fact, Real. It is a celebration of marriage, and I, for one, intend to have cake.
They walk into the place
carrying a bandana,
carrying a balaclava,
carrying a bordada
made by abuela.
They walk into the place
that burns the soles of huaraches,
the soles of tennis shoes
into twisted rubber.
They walk into the place
carrying an extra tee shirt.
An extra dress for a hija.
They walk into the land
carrying cheese crackers
and Red Bull and cheap cell phones.
They walk into the place
where money is god.
They walk into the place
where violence is all.
They walk into the
North American desert,
the border boondoggle,
the land of prisons for profit.
The walk into the land of
“you don’t understand.”
They walk into the land
where violence is the export.
They walk into the land where
loss the rule of the land.
http://www.tucsonsamaritans.org
I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day about a controversy in her church. A member raised the question to the congregation about what their policy should be about bringing guns to church. This was not a question that had ever crossed my friend’s mind in the course of many years of church-going in Chicago, but she’s in another part of the country now, and the question is real. And, if you’ll forgive the pun, loaded.
There are members of the congregation who cannot fathom why anyone would carry a gun anywhere other than a shooting range or a hunting trip, and maybe not even then. They feel threatened knowing that there is a deadly weapon in their midst, and offended by the idea of bringing an instrument of violence into a place of peace.
There are also members of the congregation who, it turns out, have been bringing their guns to church all along. They see carrying a gun as an act of community service, a way to keep the community safe should it be threatened from the outside. Carrying a gun makes them feel safe, and makes them feel like they can contribute to the safety of loved ones around them.
It does not help that these two opposed and mutually contradictory views are also associated with differences of class and culture, making any conversation deeply fraught. It’s the kind of situation that doesn’t have a clear, correct solution, and the opportunities for offending people, for misunderstanding motives and assumptions, are rampant. There is no compromise. You can’t “sort of” bring a gun to church. You allow it or you don’t, and saying, “Well, just don’t bring a gun if you don’t want to” is not much consolation to a person who feels that they can’t settle into the prayers of the community knowing that a person next to them is armed and prepared to kill.
My friend wasn’t asking for advice, but if she was, here’s what I would have said—and I think it applies to the unsolvable issues that each of us has to decide on throughout our lives. When there is no way to answer a question, it is probably time for a deeper question. There’s no good way for this congregation to answer the question: “Should people be allowed to bring guns into our sanctuary?” But maybe it would be helpful for congregants to be in conversation with one another, taking turns answering the questions “What frightens you?” and “What makes you feel safe?” It might not provide a clear-cut answer to the original question, but it would provide a way for people to tell their stories, to approach one another less from a place of knowing what is right and wrong and more from a perspective of what Nelle Morton called “hearing each other into speech.” People could relate dreams they’d had about guns, tell of their own experiences with guns, tell the stories their parents or grandparents related to them in which guns meant terror or survival. These conversations might not lead to a clear answer as to whether or not guns should be allowed in worship, but they would help to weave the fabric of the community together rather than tearing thread from thread in a pitched battle over who is right and who is wrong.
There are plenty of subjects in this country which have become that kind of battleground: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, aid to the poor, climate change, etc., etc., etc. And it’s pretty much impossible to have a conversation amongst 300 million mostly unrelated people. Which is why it is so important to grab onto these conversations wherever we can: in our churches, on Facebook, with relatives and friends. As we slip ever more deeply into a culture in which differing opinions descend into obscenities and name-calling in the comments sections of news sites or YouTube, it matters more and more that we find ways to turn to the questions behind the unsolvable questions, that we hear each other into speech. If there’s one thing that most of us can agree on, it’s that society and government based in mud-slinging and sheer contrariness gets us nowhere. We need questions that demand that we put our full humanity into the answers.
I am going to have to go back to work eventually. I mean, two women and a baby can’t make ends meet on one part-time income in Washington D.C. forever, even with a lot of family and denominational support. I’ve been aware of this since before R was born, thinking about it, trying to figure out what form, type, schedule, and mode of working would fit me well with our new Lives With Baby. Before R was born, I was a full-time parish minister for 6 years, and for many of those years my ministry was my primary focus. I had a nice life, but I did work some significant portion of every day. I often dealt with e-mail until 11pm at night. I often had evening meetings, I often worked on Saturdays, every book or article that I read or movie that I saw usually fed into the coming Sunday’s sermon. I can’t yet fully imagine going back to full-time ministry and doing it in a totally different way than I did before.
And the character challenge for me is that I have tended to be, thus far in life, a pretty black-or-white person, all-or-nothing, doing something fully or not at all. Having a baby is nothing if not an opportunity for reorganizing one’s life and one’s relationship to work. These past 10 months, I’ve had a few moments here and there to think about what I’d like to be doing, if I could be doing anything at all, and though I’m well aware that it’s not unique, what I’d like to be doing is writing more. So as we start to approach the very significant first birthday of our Little Bean, I find myself wondering if I can learn some new things at even just a quarter of the speed that she does. Can I learn to do a little bit of a variety of things instead of just one thing full-bore? Can I learn to juggle with some semblance of grace some part-time ministry, some continued forays into personal and creative writing, some cooking of new and healthy recipes for myself and my family, some yoga and other exercise, some housecleaning, some keeping up with friends and family, some household & family plans and projects?
It doesn’t look like so much when I write it up as a list like that. It’s at 11pm at night, still, when I long to “call it a day” and there are still a dozen things on the day’s “must-do” list, it’s then that I feel overwhelmed and tired. Usually a good night’s sleep is enough to renew me for another overly-optimistic day, but not always. It’s so easy for me to feel like the best way to cope with the feeling of overwhelm is to do less, do less, do less. That’s been my way of coping for a long time. But what that has meant in the past was cutting out things that matter even more to me now. Like during my first year of ministry, while I was living alone and also juggling two other part-time jobs to make ends meet, I thought it was a revelation at the time to eliminate cooking. “Look at all the time I’ve saved!” I remember exclaiming to a friend—no shopping, no food prep, no dishes to clean up. I ate mostly microwaveable meals and things that don’t require cooking, like cheese-and-crackers. Well. You can imagine the outcome of that—I didn’t feel so great, I gained weight, and, frankly, I enjoy cooking, though it’s taken me years and years to really remember that and make time for it again. My all-or-nothing autopilot way of approaching things has meant eliminating, for stretches of time, lots of other things that nourish me as well—exercise, friendships, trips with family, reading for pleasure, writing creatively, gardening, outdoor activities, and so on.
So as I start to seriously contemplate stepping a toe back into the pool of workers, I want to broach my own take on what I think will help me find, even if elusive and fleeting, that notorious balance of work-family-play. I do and will strive to “do it all”…a little bit. I want to work on practicing contentment with doing things halfway. A little bit of exercise instead of the 8-month yoga-teacher-training class I signed myself up for three years ago now. A little bit of cooking new recipes instead of feeling like I need to cook each of my favorite cookbooks from beginning-to-end Julie-and-Julia style, in order to be thorough. And spending time with our beloved kid does not have to mean never leaving her with a babysitter to give me a break or allow us to go out for a night. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing in order to be meaningful, rewarding, and worthwhile. Um…right?
The turtles go
out of their water
this time of year,
slow on roadways,
slow to mating
somewhere,
or slow to dates
with car tires.
No, there’s no
enlightenment–
there’s no one
there. (That’s
Buddhism 101
each day teaches.)
No, there’s no
virtue–
there’s no one
there. Only
being.
Lost in this
movement I rub
the cat’s head,
a black cat, a warm,
cloudy morning.
There’ no cat.
There’s no I. There’s
only purring,
this congeries
of movement
to movement–
to car tires,
to this ache
of loss
and fulfillment
in each instant.
There is
this flow
only to be
and savored.
We are all in this together, beloveds. All of creation is ultimately and intimately relational. Our faith is grounded in and continuously points us toward relationship. Covenants, promises about how we will be in relationship, cannot be made by one’s self. There are no solitary covenants – only communal ones.
It may surprise a few of you to learn that the Principles and Purposes Unitarian Universalists often speak of are part of congregational covenants. We covenant to affirm and promote the Principles and Purposes as member congregations – with other UU congregations. Indeed, in spite of the historically individualistic tendency of liberal religion, our strength has always lain in our relationships.
“None of us,” writes psychotherapist Marilyn Peterson, “can survive alone. Our capacity to trust, therefore, is precious because without it, we are isolated from the human community.” (At Personal Risk, 1992).
During my “year abroad” in California as an intern minister, I learned an important lesson from the ancient redwood trees of Northern California (author unknown).
Huge as they are,
They have very shallow root systems.
Yet they [are] not be blown over by strong winds.
The secret of their stability is
The interweaving of each tree’s roots with
Those that stand by it.
Thus, a vast network of support is formed
Just beneath the surface.
In the wildest storms,
These trees hold each other up.
So it is, I believe, with our liberal religious faith, Unitarian Universalism. Because we are an evolutionary faith, described by UU historian Susan Ritchie as “the Protestant Reformation that never stopped,” it is actually unfaithful for us to send down deep roots of certainty. Instead, we are called to send out many roots in a covenantal interweaving of commitment and accountability, becoming stronger through our relationships with each other.
May you find joy in the weaving, dear people of promise.
We want summer to be leisurely. We want it to be restful. We want it to involve sandals, long meandering days, the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass, a steady stream of lemonade or ice tea.
We don’t, usually, want it to involve more to-do lists and travel details than the winter holidays. And most of us don’t want it to fly by, though we all acknowledge that it does.
What is just one of your hopes for the summer months? I am asking myself and my family that question these days, as we charge full-bore into a busy summer. I suppose it will fly by, but I am not at all a hot-weather person and I live in Washington D.C., so it’s just fine with me if it at least scoots along pretty quickly. I am looking forward to particular moments of various trips—moments I can already imagine myself wanting to freeze and grasp and hold. And I am also a little overwhelmed by all the details of traveling with a toddler. “It’s an adventure, it’s an adventure, it’s an adventure,” I keep telling myself, but if every day is an adventure, when do we get to relax? In the hubbub of summer activities, when and how will we pause and breathe and do what feels most summery to me: savor our lives, in all their fullness?
Photographs are one way that I savor the beautiful moments—I love taking photos and I love going over them, looking through them again and again, making cards and books from them. I’d like to figure out some other, more familial, interactive ways to pause and savor together as a family and as the groups of families, friends, colleagues and communities that we will be dancing in-and-out of this summer. What do you do to savor the summer?
1.
Go ahead, climb up
the Alhambra brick–
taxis can’t come here,
and the effort it takes
is only as much as
you have in mind.
2.
How often we’ve fallen for
another algorithm for bliss,
the snake oil shill of camphor
shadows. Enough. The book
is there now, a shining blossom,
big as a magnolia bloom.
Blank. To be written. Yes, we
think–at last I’m back to myself.
Climb there too. The beautiful
street vendors are selling
therefores. The dark wine
of place. Buy some. But
carefully pluck the book, its soft
leather bent just enough to say,
yes, climb the brick passages.
3.
It may be when you wake
you’ll believe you’ve had
a stroke, but the sunlight
in its morning patterns will
teach that’s OK as well–
the world goes on without
you, us, and that’s always
been OK as well. A lesson in
belonging. Everyone’s place in
the story of the Alhambra.
Quest for Meaning is a program of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF).
As a Unitarian Universalist congregation with no geographical boundary, the CLF creates global spiritual community, rooted in profound love, which cultivates wonder, imagination, and the courage to act.